If I fail he dies, Work for the Red Cross. Red Cross recruitment poster showing a nurse on a battlefield with a wounded soldier appealing to a nurse seated at a desk; in the background, soldiers charge into battle. Contributors, Rev. Stanislaus Aloisius Iciek and Arthur G. McCoy. Duluth: J.J. LeTourneau Printing Co., c1918. Lithograph, color. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.


program there had been founded in 1892. Today this health facility is the Montefiore New Rochelle Hospital affiliated with Albert Einstein College of Medicine. After complet- ing her training there, she secured a position at a private school in New Rochelle in 1914. When the United States entered the war


in April 1917, Anderson volunteered in the local American Red Cross Nursing Service, which later was merged into the Westchester County Unit B of the American Expedition- ary Force. (Nearly 300 men from the Six Nations Reserve also enlisted, many in the famous, highly decorated 114th


Battalion of


the Haldimand Rifles in the Canadian Expe- ditionary Force.) Anderson’s unit included 12 doctors, 50 corps men and 20 nurses, 15 of whom were Canadians. In preparation for overseas service, “Andy” and the other nurses trained in classes in hygiene and surgical procedures at Fort Slocum on David’s Island in Long Island Sound across from Rye, N.Y. They were subsequently transferred to Ellis Island. Later, they were combined with nurs- es from the General Hospital at Buffalo who had been mobilized, trained and equipped at Fort Porter in that city. The unit sailed for Liverpool on February


16, arriving on March 4. They then made their way by ship from Southampton across the English Channel to Le Havre, France, and subsequently boarded a train for Vittel, reaching the city on March 10. Vittel, situ- ated in the northeast region of France, had been known for its mineral water and miner- al baths. Now its famous hotels were to serve as hospitals for the Allies. The nurses were


assigned to the 23 Buffalo Unit and housed in one of the villas confiscated for the war ef- fort by French authorities. This base hospital contained 21 buildings, comprising hotels, villas and garages with a bed capacity for 1,800 patients at a time. The medical facil- ity had opened in January 1918 and ceased operations in February 1919, after treating more than 11,000 patients. Unlike Cora Elm, Anderson left behind a di-


ary, recording her experiences as a nurse from late January through the end of July 1918. Although much of her entries were of


her travels to Vittel and residence in the city and not hospital related, the reader is able to get a feel for wartime France, where life went on while death was all around. At a dance on April 6, Anderson indicates that a fear of a gas attack was imminent during the festivities. On June 6, she records that she saw 57 patients that day as well as three German prisoners of war. Sadly on June 16, she notes that a young American soldier, who “adopted” her as an older sister while apparently recovering, had hemorrhaged and died; she cried all night. In a later newspaper interview, she said that to deal with her own grief, she wrote a personal note to the soldier’s mother. Her diary entries in July 1918 are more


detailed. On July 4, French and British convalescent soldiers with heads bandaged and arms in slings honored their American comrades in arms by holding a parade to cel- ebrate Independence Day. On July 6, the unit performed 50 operations. Three weeks later, Anderson was in the operating room all day. On July 14, Bastille Day, the Medical Depart-


ment participated in decorating French and American soldiers’ graves. Anderson wrote that the nurses also visited the major Ger- man POW camp housed in the city, although she did not indicate if they were there to pro- vide medical services. In a later interview in the 1980s, she reflected on the aftermath of war – the “awful sight of buildings in rubble, trees burnt, spent shells all over the place, whole towns blown up.” After the war, Anderson returned to the


Six Nations Reserve and married Claybran Monture in 1919. They raised four children. Until the mid-1950s, she continued her work as a nurse and as a midwife on the reserve and at the Lady Willington Hospital in Brantford. Aged well over 100, she died in 1996. She received a military funeral as the last surviving Six Nations veteran of World War I on the reserve. Today a street and park in the City of Brantford are named after her. Her extraordinary role in World War I is also highlighted in a permanent exhibit in the First Peoples’ Hall in the Canadian Museum of Civilization (now the Canadian Museum of History). Although Native women’s roles often


get buried in the overwhelming amount of writings on male warriors, they also distin- guished themselves during wartime. There are no better examples than the contribu- tions of two Iroquois nurses – Cora Elm and Edith Anderson.X


Laurence M. Hauptman, a frequent contributor to American Indian magazine, is SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus.


SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 33


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